Forrester: Vista is Like Ill-fated New Coke

by , 5:15 PM EDT, July 24th, 2008

A Forrester report released on Wednesday revealed that of 50,000 enterprise users, over 87 percent were still using WIndows XP. The author of the report compared Vista to the ill-fated "New Coke."

The Forrester Report noted that only 8.8 percent of those surveyed, 18 months after Vista's release, were running the new OS. Mr. Thomas Mendel, the author of the report, said that it wold be wise by Microsoft to "consider following the lead of Microsoft's important partner Intel and re-evaluating the case of Vista," according to Computerworld on Thursday.

Even so, the rate of adoption of Vista remains twice that of Mac OS X. That's not surprising since Vista is the natural follow-on to XP while companies would have to make a major commitment to switch to a new OS like Mac OS X.

The report undercuts Microsoft's claim that over 180 million copies of Vista have been sold, according to Eric Lai at CW. Not often mentioned is that many companies have bought machines pre-loaded with Vista, then downgraded to XP in compliance with corporate licensing plans.

The Forrester report also noted that almost 20 percent of enterprise users are using the Firefox browser and urged corporate developers to make sure their apps work with Firefox.

Microsoft, in a period of reflection and reorganization after the Yahoo! missteps, appears to be ready to address the issues associated with Vista.